In Christine Kitano’s “Persimmons,” a daughter receives a package from her mother containing persimmons that are so ripe their juice stains the box. This is one of the poem’s many rich details. In fact, we can see Kitano’s masterful descriptions everywhere in the poem — the persimmons’ skins falling “like strips of ribbon” and the “stabs” of color the fruit make when they’re ready to be picked. And even if we don’t know the Korean language, we can feel the round vowel of “gahm” in her mother’s voice, which is the poem’s most salient detail. The persimmons bind the mother and daughter, bridging the geographical and linguistic distance between them.

Christine Kitano is the author of “Sky Country” and “Birds of Paradise.” She was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Ithaca, N.Y., where she is an assistant professor of creative writing, poetry and Asian American literature at Ithaca College.

David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin Lit: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.